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Splintering Syria, no end in sight for civil war

Mark ColvinUpdated
Wed 7 Aug 2013, 7:50 PM AEST

Syria is splintering and fragmenting further as the long civil war continues with no prospect of an end. Both sides are claiming victories but none are winning the war. Yesterday, rebels seized a key air base at Minakh in Aleppo Province from government forces, while the government celebrated victory in the formerly central city of Homs. Chief international correspondent for BBC World News, Lyse Doucet, says it's becoming a proxy war.

Transcript

MARK COLVIN: Syria is splintering and fragmenting further as the long civil war continues with no prospect of an end.

Yesterday brought a classic example of the way both sides are claiming victories but neither is winning the war.

Rebels seized a key air base at Minakh in Aleppo Province from government forces. And the government celebrated victory in the formerly rebel held central city of Homs.

As chief international correspondent for BBC World News, Lyse Doucet has reported extensively from the Syrian war. She says it's partly become a proxy war; in one example in June, she met Hezbollah soldiers fighting with Government troops in the destroyed town of Qusayr.

I asked her about other proxy forces in Syria.

LYSE DOUCET: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey, The United States, Britain, you name it. This is a war that is drawing in so many different players, so much so that sometimes you wonder whether this war is about Syria at all.

MARK COLVIN: Was there ever a good choice for president Obama or for that matter the European Union? Was there ever anything that they could do which wouldn't enflame things further?

LYSE DOUCET: I sometimes say in our profession, thank God we only have to write about it, that we don't have to be the people to try to solve this.

Someone once put it this way, that there are two certainties in this war. It is absolutely certain that the only military intervention that could make a decisive shift in the balance on the ground would be the kind of full scale intervention that we saw in Libya with the no-fly zone NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organisation) involvement. It would have to involve the United States. So there's no way you can actually bring down president Assad militarily unless you involve the United States.

MARK COLVIN: That worked in Libya because Libya had a very weak air force, it worked in Iraq after the first Gulf war because Saddam Hussein's air force had been very much weakened, but that's not really true of Bashar al-Assad's air force is it?

LYSE DOUCET: No it isn't, but let me tell you the other certainty of this war. That only a full scale military intervention will be able to defeat president Assad's formidably military machine.

But the second certainty is that even if all these countries, including the United States, become involved, the certainty that they will have any influence on the post war situation is absolutely zero.

And that's what we've seen as well, we've seen - never mind the kind of decisive and significant military involvement 2003 in Iraq, what happened during the Arab Spring, look at Iraq now, look at Libya, well look at Egypt, the United States has limited and diminishing influence.

And so it is a big question for policy makers. Do you want to spend all that blood and treasure for getting what - you may have a significant impact on the course of events, but your impact later will be so minimal as to draw into question whether you should have been involved at all. But in the world in which we live, to just to be seen to be standing idly by, wringing your hands, which is what president Obama is being accused of, is being a ditherer, is also for a politician, for a world leader, an inexcusable position to be in, and for some morally indefensible.

MARK COLVIN: But regardless of the outside interests, can you see any way that this is going to end with a united Syria? Is it - does it now look inevitable that Syria will break up?

LYSE DOUCET: Well that is the nightmare scenario. And the optimists want to say that there is enough forces pulling in to keep Syria together, and there is still a sort of Syria-ness about Syria that will bring Syrians, no matter what their differences are, at least hold the fabric of the nation together.

But it is now being pulled in so many directions, you see now some parts of the north, the Kurdish areas being run by the Syrian Kurdish party, the PYD (Democratic Union Party), basically running their own fair as a kind of autonomy; will they be happy when the war is over to just say 'right, we'll come back now, you know, we won't have our flag, we won't have our Kurdish schools, we won't be running out own affairs.' The kind of sectarian violence that we've seen in the war between the Sunni's the Alawites, the Kurds, the Christians whatever, will they be able to bring those different - all those groups back together again? It's going to be very, very difficult. And some will say you know, well nigh impossible.

The other question is: will president Assad ever you know, no matter what military might he has, and the backing of Russia and Iran, Hezbollah, will he ever be able to recapture areas like the city of Aleppo in the north, which is now most of we think, it's very hard to say with any certainty, most of Aleppo is now in opposition hands. And so people are saying that maybe there will be - that one scenario is the division of the country.

And we see it in some of the tactics that are used by president Assad's forces, that they're concentrating their troops on the ground, their use of the air power to several key parts of you know, the axis between Damascus and Homs, leading then to the ancestral land in Latakia on the Mediterranean coast where Tartus the only Russian port in the Mediterranean is now. You concentrate on those areas, and that is the area that Hezbollah is most interested in as well.

Leave the north to the opposition, and of course in Assad's thinking leave it to them, and leave it to fight amongst themselves, because the opposition more and more is turning its guns on each other. And we are in an extraordinary historical moment where people - when I'm in the region not a day goes by with someone mentioning the Sykes-Picot agreement, the kind of post war agreements of the turn of the last century ...

MARK COLVIN: The powerful declaration in the Sykes, who would have thought that these things would emerge from the first half of the 20th century to dominate the picture now.

LYSE DOUCET: Well this is it, and people are saying the first chance of a re-drawing of the boundaries that we have seen since the end of the First World War, and where Britain and France and other powers, literally on the back of envelopes, drew the boundaries of the Middle East, and that these are in danger of unravelling. There is a real risk of that. And it may not be that people choose to do that, although I said some parties may want to do it, but simply by force of circumstances, and the inability to pull back the guns, to pull back all of these disparate forces into a coherent hole, and that we may just see it not just unravelling, but simply falling apart.

MARK COLVIN: Lyse Doucet, chief international correspondent for BBC world news, will be speaking at the Lowy Institute on war, peace and Middle East politics on Friday.